I've been eating Navitas cacao products for several years now (mostly the nibs, though, lately, not the powder). I was horrified to read the Consumer Lab report that just came out. It found extremely high levels of cadmium (though no lead, at least), in Navitas Naturals cacao powder. Alas, I will be switching brands.

This has been a great discovery for me. I exercise fairly intensely, and need to replenish electrolytes, above all potassium (K) and sodium. Sodium is the easy part. For the K, I'd been taking the pills with 99 mg. in them (I think that's the legal limit on size). The powder makes it much easier, and MUCH cheaper to get the amount of K I need. I just mix it in with water after I exercise. (Also before bed -- it helps, along with Ca and a little Mg and sodium, with nocturnal leg cramps.)

For people who drink a lot of tea, this is a great bargain. I order this, and Frontier Natural's white tea, every few months. MUCH, much cheaper than any bulk tea of similar (high) quality that I can get locally.

I've been using this for a while, and had been very satisfied.
I normally open the capsules and take the powder in divided doses. I immediately noticed something was different with some recently purchased bottles: the contents of the capsules -- in all four recently purchased bottles (all same batch number) -- were essentially solid, instead of the normal loose powder. It was possible to sort of "mush" the solid mass and turn part of it into powder, but only part. The rest was hard clumps.
I noticed something else: the normal "bite" on the tongue I notice when taking the powder was mostly -- though not entirely -- absent.
I described this to a friend of mine who's a chemist who said that ALA is extremely heat sensitive, and that the shipment probably became "polymerized," and was now mostly worthless (though not dangerous at all).
IHerb's excellent customer service refunded my money, so no complaints about IHerb. But I'll be switching to a diff. brand of ALA.